Wednesday, January 13, 2010

CPAC has resisted the far right’s efforts to pressure it to drop GOProud as a co-sponsor of the popular conference, even though some groups have threatened to boycott the event. Last month, CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale told Hot Air that she was “satisfied” that GOProud “do not represent a ‘radical leftist agenda’ and thus “should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor. David Keene, the head of CPAC’s main organizing group, assured the far right that GOProud would not be allowed to have any speakers at the conference.

These concessions weren’t enough for Liberty University Law School. Last month, Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Liberty Law School Dean Mat Staver, joined by other conservative evangelical leaders, wrote a letter to Keene with their objections. Staver has now announced that since they never received a “formal response,” they are dropping their co-sponsorship.

They will keep a booth at the conference though, alongside all the usual wingnut convention merchandise they have every year:

Sarah Palin will be the headline speaker in the nation's first-ever Tea Party convention next month in Tennessee, raising the specter of a spin-off political party already laying claim to a presidential candidate. A generic “Tea Party” is already more popular than either Democrats or Republicans, while Palin rivals Obama in popularity in a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. "Tea types can either blossom into a Perotista-style third-party movement or be subsumed to some degree by the GOP," notes Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Eric Erickson says that Palin will be ruining herself and a whistleblower says that the teabaggers are crooks and sponsors are pulling out.

Growing pains or simple screw-ups? I don't know, but you can see why they had to cancel The Guiding Light after something like 50 years. It can't compete.